The invention relates in general to heat exchangers and in particular to a new and useful heat exchange unit that has heat exchange plates that are mounted on a support at intervals from one another and have heat carrying channels that connect with one another.
Heat exchange systems of this kind are known in which the heat exchanger plates lie at intervals one on top of the other and thus create a vertical stack. To achieve the greatest possible heat release or absorption, plates, preferably of plastic, with a relatively large surface area, but thin and containing many narrow heat carrying channels must be used. A properly functioning stack of such heat exchanger plates is usually heavy, since, particularly under icing conditions, too great a sagging of the plates under their own weight must be prevented or rendered harmless, which means either leaving large intervals between the plates with correspondingly less efficient use of space or providing relatively complicated supporting structures between the plates.